I haven’t written anything for this website for the better part of a year, since my poetry book announcement and declaring The Leipzig Glocal (leipglo) a micro-publishing house. That change made me lose the urgency; plus I’ve been living in Hanoi, Vietnam, since September 2025, an experience that has consumed me. So updates and email responses have been painfully slow, and leipglo’s social media channels very quiet. Leipglo static pages like the doctors listing continue to be popular, though, and a doctor personally wrote to me asking for his name to be added. I did it two months later (today) and the movement propelled me to finally post an article again, with the only type of creative writing I’ve been doing: poetry. Hence “Schrödinger’s Love.”
Physics nerds will get the reference right away – Schrödinger’s Cat. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with the now famous thought experiment in 1935, sharing in his buddy Albert Einstein’s frustration with quantum probabilities. The experiment goes something like this: Imagine a cat is in a sealed box with a radioactive particle, a hammer and a flask of poison. Sounds dangerous for the cat, right? Now, keep in mind that, according to quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in superposition, or multiple states, until it’s observed and the states collapse into one. So the particle may either have decayed or not, which you’d only find out if you opened the box. The answer would come in the form of the cat being found either alive or dead, as a decayed particle would have caused the Geiger counter to go off, activate the hammer and release the lethal poison. And with this, he hoped to demonstrate the absurdity of certain quantum mechanics assertions.
What happens if you transfer the concept of Schrödinger’s Cat to a situationship, you may ask?
OK, maybe you never asked the question, but I did. My poem, displayed below in full, plays with the concept of a situationship and two people’s stated interpretations of it (did we or didn’t we). In case you have been fortunate enough not to suffer through one, a situationship is something that could either be a relationship or not, that could either be alive or dead, depending on whom you ask. Even the dictionary gods have conceded it’s a thing. So maybe they did open the box. You decide whether my poem has opened the box or not.
Either way, it has been a not wholly unfun thought experiment for me to write this poem. Bonus points if you get the other references in it. I’ll give you a hint: There’s more science, plus art and a(n) (un)healthy dose of deconstruction. Words can have multiple meanings. No wonder it took me three weeks to complete the poem, with all the tweaks I kept making.
Any resemblance to real events or people is merely coincidence. Or…?
Schrödinger’s Love
The box is shut
by both your fists,
the story’s not over
’cause it never existed,
still you remember
every word we knit,
can’t help but recite me
through your gritted teeth.
The cracks in your wall
obscured by gaslight,
the rips in your spacetime
betrayed by your eyes,
as you seize our hammer
from my white knuckles,
telling me I dreamt
it wasn’t just a pipe.
The exit flashes
so you bolt off the stage,
the curtain’s blown off
by my raw naked script,
causing your hologram
to shove me to the stands,
but it briefly flickers
when I heckle: “You are it!”
The door gets slammed
while I swing it back open,
the cat’s on the mat
to swallow us again,
meowing: “This is the end”
and also: “This will live on,”
“you shake like electrons”
“entangled through keyholes.”
© 2026, Ana Beatriz Ribeiro / Leipzig Glocal Publishing. All rights reserved.
